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HER TEARS ANENT TURKISH ATROCITIES

“Christian England” is agonizing over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem. The oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain. The history of every barbarous prince of the Orient, in those dark days when might made right and plunder was the recognized prerogative of royalty; the annals of every potentate who has reigned by the grace of Allah and kneeled to kiss the robe of the prophet, may be searched in vain for a parallel in unbounded rapacity and calculating atrocity. England’s despoilment of India constitutes the supreme crime of all the ages, the acknowledged acme of infamy- Europe never dreaded Alaric the Visigoth, nor hated Attila the Scourge of God, as India dreads and detests John Bull, “the white beast from over the black water.” He has not persecuted because of difference of religious dogma, as have the Mohammedan Sultans and the Christian Czars. That kind of enterprise doesn’t pay, and John Bull never wastes on theological sentiment one ounce of energy that can be coined into cash.

A British trading company had leased land at Madras and Calcutta, for which it paid rent to the native powers. For the protection of its warehouses it was permitted to built forts and keep a few armed police, but was in no sense independent. Its position in India was analogous to that of British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or factory and have been authorized to police their property. The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided among nominal viceroys who were really independent sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent. The teeming millions of India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the countless host which Xerxes led into Greece, or Darius hurled upon the steel-crested phalanxes of that bloody prototype of John Bull, Alexander the Macedonian marauder. The governments of India were showy rather than strong, and a condition of semi-anarchy had been engendered by the frequent incursions of fierce tribes of robbers, the jealousies and ambitions of rival nabobs and the mischievous schemes of a French adventurer named Dupleix. The company continued to augment its forces until strong enough not only to protect its own property, but to overawe the native governments. Then, on one dishonest pretext or another, it began the work of transforming India into a British province. Robert Clive succeeded in accomplishing in Asia what Dr. Jamieson attempted with far better excuse in South Africa. Rival powers applied to the company for assistance, and it mattered not with which it allied itself, both were in the end destroyed or enslaved, compelled to pour their wealth into the coffers of the British corporations. No crime was too horrible, no breach of faith too brazen if it promised to further the ambition and increase the gains of the company. Its policy was to unite with a weak government to plunder a strong one, then, by subjugating its ally, to make itself master of both. By treasons and stratagems, by forged treaties and briberies, by infamies planned in cold blood and executed with more than Kurdish barbarity, the garden spot of the earth, with its teeming millions and inestimable wealth, was made to pay tribute to British greed. Macaulay, the eulogist of both Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, thus describes India when Great Britain, without a shadow of excuse, laid her marauding paw upon it in the same manner and for the self-same purpose that Cortez invaded the halls of the Montezumas: